


A Room of Her Own

by C9T9



Category: Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII Series
Genre: AU?, Domestic Fluff, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 05:57:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12292734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/C9T9/pseuds/C9T9
Summary: Lightning, her home, and the matter of it's sudden occupancy.





	A Room of Her Own

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eightbots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eightbots/gifts).



These days, Lightning was never quite comfortable when she walked into her home.  A sort of whiplash, maybe: she’d never figured out how to deal living closely in that tenement with Serah or the clamor of the Guardian Corps barracks.  The day she made sergeant, she took out a loan that she’d carry for decades.  That was alright by her.  A burden of abstract numbers on her balance was matched equally by a new house - prefab, but it had style - tucked away at the end of the street half a mile from the beach that  _ wasn’t  _ battered by the waxing and waning of the tourist season.  It was above a pool, and every last damn inch of it was hers.

Ergo, the problem.  When it became obvious that Fang needed a place to stay for more than a couple nights in the drunk tank, Lightning dragged an old tent out of storage and set it up on her balcony.  Out of consideration for her host, Fang had even set up a ladder to bypass the inside entirely, climbing in and out of the pool below - but she still had to eat, and do other things, and well, Fang wouldn’t have admitted it, but Lightning could tell she was curious and liked to poke around.  So coming home was never exactly the same: it was like walking into what was now a living thing, that took breaths and beat its heart on a long and slow cycle, true, but inside it, something changed every day.  Subtly, but she couldn’t miss it: when drinks in the fridge disappeared and were replaced, the contours of a body pressed into the couch, the slow migration of towels in and out of the bathroom.

It hurt more than she had thought.  Some of that was the expectation, how a good deed for a few days for someone down on their luck was turning into the second month now, but that wouldn’t have mattered if it didn’t disturb her to begin with.  And if she explained it to anyone, she’d sound crazy!  Could she possibly care that much about having to clean someone else’s hair out of the bathroom?  Nobody would have found that pleasurable, but she couldn’t explain the crawling under her skin that came on, much less how her usual, meditative love of cleaning was becoming a treadmill, running to stand still.  That it felt like she was trying to scrub Fang out of her house when she attacked the odd stain on the floor that’d been there for a year.  

And Fang didn’t even seem to mind it as much, that was infuriating, how she would toss her surfboard into the pool every morning and dive in after it on her way to the beach; how she was just polite enough, handing over an apologetic sum every now and then to cover food and a pseudo-rent, the provenance of which Lightning had  _ no  _ idea, but it couldn’t have been that bad.  She had washed up one night drunk without ID at Lightning’s doorstep and was having so much fun as a free spirit inside Lightning’s carefully constructed walls and floorplan, and everything else besides like when Lightning had to go take a long jog after cooking for two made her feel like she’d forgotten how to cook at all.

But that was a telling incident.  She’d cooked for Serah so many times that it should have been second nature, that when Fang was obviously hungry, hadn’t picked up one of her usual dinners from one of the beach vendors that sold grilled fish and corn out of carts and came home anyway, that making a pilaf for two like she’d done for Serah should have been  _ easy _ .  It turned out that she couldn’t relate to Fang like she could Serah - well, no shit, Fang said, laughing, when Lightning had admitted it years later, but she couldn’t pretend.  Not that Fang was just someone who she liked, which she wouldn’t admit, or that Fang was a stranger who she would treat like family, which, realistically, she did, but those two things were both true, and yet ended up combining to make something that she couldn’t understand.

So she burnt the pilaf, bringing the pot out onto the balcony to try and salvage the bits of rice and mango and chicken that were stuck in there out of the black crust, her and Fang around the pot next to Fang’s tent with a spoon each on a warm late-year night, taking care not to touch utensils but coming just so close every time.  Turned out it was the best thing she’d ever cooked.

The next week she spent at work completely consumed, barely saying a word to anyone else and coming home late, slipping into a cycle of wake work crash repeat that went on until Sunday.  Then she came home determined to have a conversation with the now-home Fang to the effect that she was a grown woman, and so was Fang, and as such the charity period must have worn off by now, even if she could help with finding a place she couldn’t stay anymore.  

Lightning was so set on the plan she came home and was revving up for a speech when she realized Fang wasn’t there at all, that Fang had stayed out a bit late past the routine that  _ she  _ had been slipping into.  In hindsight, she should have realized at the time how odd it was for a seeming ‘free spirit’ to be home whenever she got back as well, but back then, she didn’t see the pattern.  All Lightning felt was the sudden disturbance in what was supposed to be her new routine that she was going to smash, when she heard the pool splash and Fang leap up the ladder to stretch on the balcony.

She had always been kissed with a darker skin tone, but all the surfing she’d been doing made a clear difference as she stretched, highlighted against a sunset, water dripping over her body and making that blue silk sarong that made her seem like more than a vagabond grip her legs, and…

Well, she noticed Lightning standing in the kitchen, caught ready to evict Fang like a cat ready to pounce, and Fang just waved, putting an exclamation point on the gesture by way of a cheeky grin before going about her business.  And all Lightning could do was wave back.  

Not long after that, they formalized things, drawing up a contract for rent on the back of a napkin so Fang could move inside - well, it didn’t say that was the point, but the rainy season was coming up, and, after all, what else would be the point of agreeing to divide the living and dining room in two with a curtain, giving Fang a space to her own?  

It took a bit of rearranging, moving chairs and tables this way and that and standing on a ladder to attach the light curtain that, really, didn’t conceal all that much to the ceiling.  So there was a lot of bumping into each other, inevitably, Fang tapping her in such a way that Lightning laughed like she hadn’t in… a very long time, and, well, Lightning had agreed earlier to buy Fang a mattress.

She was off work the next day, and the rainy season had ushered itself in with so much of a storm that her watch said 11 in the morning, but looking beyond the glass shield that deployed around the balcony she wouldn’t have been able to tell if it was 11 or 1 or 6 with all the rain.  When she started gathering up some silk sheets and blankets, Fang didn’t even need any instruction to follow along and grab the pillows as well, and then, without any need for explicit coordination they both went to grab the couch as well, hauling it onto the balcony.  

Out there wasn’t about talking to each other - not that they would have heard each other over the thunder and the pounding of the rain anyway.  In fact, that was the point; everything important between then, it turned out, could be agreed upon by lying there with the rain roaring and holding each others’ arms.  Except when Fang raised her voice enough to apologize for messing with the arrangement of the living room to make this moment work, and Lightning just told her they could worry about the living room later. 


End file.
